Cameron Crowe Movies Ranked
5. Vanilla Sky (2001)
Based on Alejandro Amenábar’s Spanish-language film Abre los ojos (Eng: Open Your Eyes), Cameron Crowe borrowed star Penelope Cruz for his American adaptation Vanilla Sky, a film which packed the same emotional punch as the original, only with more prime Tom Cruise and references to American pop culture. This mix makes Vanilla Sky a moving time capsule on new millennium America and the changing ideals of the time, as well as a quite moving piece in its own right. Did it miss many of the treasures of the original film? Sure. Does it matter? Not so much in the case of this list, where we rank it dead in the middle at number 5.
4. Singles (1992)
Having released the iconic 80s film Say Anything as his debut feature, Crowe waited three years to release follow up Singles in 1992, a film in which he managed to encapsulate the grunge movement of the time in an hourglass story of friendship and romance that feels as much like a time capsule as everything else the filmmaker has ever put to film. Featuring lots of long hair, pessimism and a general lack of approval for the status quo, Singles was perhaps the film that grunge mega-fan (see Pearl Jam Twenty above) was born to make, and it was surely one of his best outings too.
3. Jerry Maguire (1996)
Fast forward 4 years from our last entry and the new, highly ambitious and prosperous 90s were in full swing, making the similarly as ambitious, money-versus-love centred plot of Jerry Maguire another time capsule of culture worth watching. It was the director’s first partnership with Tom Cruise, perhaps the decade’s biggest movie star, and together they forged a romantic comedy that is so readily associated with its most iconic and popular moments that it’s easy to forget the real qualities of the film, of which there are many. Maguire was the launching pad to superstardom for Renée Zellweger and has probably the best performance of Cuba Gooding, Jr’s career, but most importantly as regards this list it remains Crowe’s only ever Best Picture nominee, and only one of two films to ever earn him a screenwriting nomination (the second is yet to come).
